Yours
by Sweetie Amoeba
Summary: He doesn't see how he can live with this for much longer, feeling like he could explode in a fiery column of self-hatred at any second...(oneshot)


He didn't start talking until he was two and a half and by then they all knew something was the matter. He was incredibly sensitive to noise and would never look directly at people's faces. Lois knew that underneath the gurgles and coos of the babies she'd raised, there was a certain strangeness, an oddity that she figured was just in their DNA. Jamie was different.

Francis and Reese were trouble from the day they were born. Malcom was freakishly smart but severely lacking in social skills. Dewey was just...odd. She could accept that. But the last one was troubling.

Lois figures that the personalities of her children are a result of something in their DNA. She's heard stories of boys who misbehave as badly as Francis and Reese do, of child geniuses like Malcolm that go on to invent things and win prizes and cure diseases and things like that. She knows Dewey isn't a genius or a troublemaker, but he's a musical prodigy with average intelligence and that seems like it would be enough to let him float through life without much trouble. Jamie is different though.

The first face he ever saw was Francis's. The day he was born, in Lois's sunny bedroom with the wall missing, surrounded by people, Jamie came into the world red and screaming. And it was such a hard thing for Francis to do, not just because it was his own mother giving birth, but because he and Lois were both vaguely aware of something dark and horrible, something no one else had a clue about. Days later, Hal would wonder why they were behaving so strangely, as if a terrible chapter of their lives had just begun. And he didn't know.

For a few days after giving birth, Lois is racked with nausea. Hal finds her in the bathroom, hands clamped tight over her ears, trying to drown out the shrill, harsh scream of her newborn in his crib in the next room. She stares wildly into the mirror, notices every single gray hair and wrinkle that jumps into view in the fluorescent light. She spills hot tears and ignores him.

Francis is feeling sick, too, and what no one realizes is that he has the exact same affliction as his mother. It's not a flu, it's not disgust at the birth. He has to take a few days off from work to hide out at a friend's house and cope with what has happened. He knows that the body can react physically to emotion, that it can tell you when something is really wrong.

He's been crying in bed at night for the past nine months. He would wake up and thinks of the tiny life growing in his mother's womb, and he'd want to die. He doesn't see how he can live with this for much longer, feeling like he could explode in a fiery column of self-hatred at any second.

They receive the letter in the mail when Jamie is two and a half years old. This is something Lois does secretly, making absolutely sure not to leave a single trace of her actions. She took a Q-tip and swabbed the inside of Jamie's perfect round cheek, sent it out and waited six weeks with her stomach buzzing like a horde of angry bees. She sips tea and grabs the white envelope out of the mail pile. Hal is at work, thank God, and the boys are at school. She has all day to deal with whatever the letter says.

As soon as she reads it, she calls Francis and orders him to come home immediately. He's in town for a few weeks, between jobs, still floundering around and unsure of his place in the world. He drives home, feeling sick, and meets Lois behind the air-drying sheets in the backyard.

He reads the letter silently and looks up in disbelief. Lois's face has settled into a gruesome expression, of trauma and awful, awful shame.

"He's yours, Francis."

This is what he has been anticipating. Those few years spent sick with worry, knowing that their secret would find it's way out and there would be no more ignoring, no more pretending it didn't happen. Lois says nothing, standing in the backyard in the sunshine, and Francis begins to sob.

He sort of knew all along, but he still had the childish idealism in him, to make him pray he wasn't the father and deny, deny, deny.

The next thing Lois does, the only thing she can think of doing, is to leave Francis trembling in the yard and walk into her bedroom where Jamie lies sleeping. She picks him up, breathes in his delicate toddler scent, and tries to empty her mind. She can't. All she can think of is how hard, how terrible the rest of their lives are going to be.


End file.
